My Friend
by LoveFromShinola
Summary: 'Goodbye, my friend.' Talia Al Ghul's thoughts on her protector, Bane, through the years.


**AN:**

**Another Talia fic, but more Bane centric, because I love that relationship :D. Thanks Nolanverse x I DO NOT OWN TDKR.**

She is too young when her mother dies. Too young to remember the woman much at all, too young to remember anything but her black hair, soft skin and warm dark eyes. She doesn't understand at first, until her protector tells her in his gentle voice, just where Mama has gone:

'She's no longer here in hell, my dear. She's up there, up where the light is, but she's even further. She's so far, that even if you climbed all the way up the wall you wouldn't reach her. Where she is, there's light all around.'

She asks, 'Why did Mama not take me to the light?'

Her protector answers, 'Because Mama was forced to go, and they wouldn't let her take you, because one day, you're going to climb out, up and away from here, into the real world, where you'll be a princess.'

She giggles, a pure and innocent sound, so strange in this Hell on Earth they live in. But both of them have known no more or less. They were raised here, born here, two kindred spirits now sheltering one another, he more so than her. With Mama gone, she clings to this new presence, to her protector, with the fiercest grip she can muster.

She does not understand death, even though it is all around, and, wanting to keep her innocent, her protector does not explain. Sometimes truths are granted too early in life, he says later. There was enough in there to fear, without fearing death as well.

* * *

She is not so old when she finally reaches that light. Her protector does not mention it often – hope gives despair greater weight, she understands that now, will use it one day. There is a fight, a fight that scares her and sends her into his arms, where she finds the shelter she craves.

He hushes her and speaks soothing words, but the voices are too loud, the horrible noises of pain and anger melting together in one cacophony of terrible sound. She is moving, he is moving, and suddenly she is hoisted somewhere out of reach. Instinct kicks in, that human will for survival and she clambers from the reach of the other faceless, unkind men.

They're hurting her protector, but she knows she cannot help him. She cannot go back, not yet. He would not want her to, not now, when she has a chance. The fear of letting him down, of having his sacrifices be in vain, spurs her on. She reaches the greatest obstacle, the sure fall where men always lose the battle, men stronger and leaner than she can ever be, but men with much less fear.

When she makes the jump, when her heart stops racing and she looks down she cannot discern him in the throng. She thinks, swiftly, that he might be buried, but pushes the thought away. It will not do. They are all aghast at what she's done, but she does not care.

Steeling her childish resolve, she clambers to the sky. She looks out across barren desert land, then back to the pit where she has been for all of her forever, and makes a decision. One day, she'll come back. One day, when she has the upper hand. One day, after she's found this mysterious man called father, the man the men used to say would one day wreak vengeance for her mother's pain.

One day, she'll come back for her protector.

* * *

It takes a decade. A decade before she finally finds the mysterious man, but not long to convince him who she is. He can see her mother, he says, not just in her hair and her face, but in her soul, whatever that means. That very day, when she tells him of their fate, they return to the pit.

She feels an unfounded fear as they descend, that she will never leave this place. But her father and the League of Shadows cannot be defeated by a squalid band of thugs, and suddenly this Hell does not seem so hellish anymore, with allies like these behind her. The men that once towered over her as a child seem smaller, everything seems less threatening, and she can almost surrender her irrational fears. Almost.

It is father that finds him and she comes running.

Her protector, she sees, has never had anyone protect him, in these long ten years. She might cry for his state and his suffering, for what he has sacrificed to give her her wings, her light, but father is here, and she will not cry before him.

Still she cannot stop the dampness of her eye, and the tenderness with which she touches his covered cheek. When she reveals his horrific pain in all its glory she thinks she might vomit, not from fear but from pure anguished guilt that it was for her that this was done to him…all for her.

'Oh, what have they done to you?' she says, desperate to stop the break in her voice as Father stands watching.

He does not move. She wonders, fleetingly, if he can, but his eyes say what his lips cannot:

They did what had to be done. What had to be done to save you.

Father is saying something about impossibilities and putting out of miseries but she will not listen. She flings herself across her protector as he would often come across her, and suddenly she takes his role and feels a rush of anger towards this newer man. Where was he when her protector saved her and gave her her life? Where was he when she was half-starved, dying of thirst, terrified out of her senses by some new nightmare? Gone, never to have known her. How dare he threaten the one person who had stayed. The one person who had continued to love her.

She will hear no arguments, they will take him back.

And so, take him back they do.

* * *

It is the longest road to recovery she has known, it takes years of hard work and training and endurance, but she knows he has it in him, in every fibre of his being, and she stands strong beside him, despite Father's protestations. Father can never understand the bond she shares with her protector. When she was a child he was like a father, a friend and guardian. Then he became her saviour. He has been everything to her she could ever need, and she cannot abandon him. Not when his struggles come as a result of his loyalty to her. No. To abandon him now would be a cruelty she could never endure.

In time, Father relents, if only a touch. Enough to gift her protector with the thing he needs. A way to stop the pain. It is a mask, and it covers most of him, but not his eyes. She is adamant in that as she oversees the design. When it is time for it to be fixed onto him, she banishes all around them. It is only her protector and she, safe in being alone together as they always were.

Then she does something she never does again, or never can. She kisses him on his malformed, aching lips. Dry with disuse, from where a voice thin as a grain of sand echoes. But when her lips touch his they are stronger than she can ever remember them being, and suddenly it is not the chaste kiss she thought it to be, not the kiss between friend and friend, but something more, something undeniable. It is over far too quickly, and as their lips part she sees the pain return to his dear, dear eyes. She holds up the mask, entreating he wear it, to keep the pain at bay. With a sadness she cannot describe, he nods, and she, ever so tenderly, puts the thing carefully in place.

When she looks at him, draws back and really looks, he is different, even though the same. He is still her protector, but his weakness is fading. He is becoming that strong man he was, but now he has a taste for vengeance and fury, newly equipped with the ability to _be _and to do whatever he chooses. Save the one thing he desires. There is only a sentence ever said on it, said in his new, deep, echoing voice:

'We can only ever be friends, my dear. Only friends now.'

She nods, tries to be firm. He sees straight through her, and she through him, even with his face obscured, because the eyes of course, the eyes are the windows to the soul.

He gathers her to him, emboldened by his new life beginning, and they lay there for a while. Then, before she can think back, before she can cry or hesitate or make some mistake that she regrets, before she can ardently wish 'friends' wasn't all they could be, she gets up and leaves.

He watches her, her protector, every step of the way.

* * *

Not long after that, her father excommunicates him.

There can be no forgiveness for it. In her rage she cries out to her father:

'You weren't there,' she screams to his back, 'you weren't there! He was there!' She can feel her insides being wracked and she falls to the ground, the only show of weakness she's ever displayed to him willingly.

'He loves you. That cannot be tolerated.'

There is a knife digging into her heart and those words send it plunging fast until she can barely breathe.

'We're friends,' she sobs, half a whisper, broken. 'Just friends.'

* * *

Now she watches from a tall, bright window, filled with light, as her father's murderer tries to destroy her protector. He has tried, she knows, to show her no weakness in their dealings together lately. He will not break first, he will not show emotion first. He cannot bear to have his heart broken, and neither can she.

But then there is a crash, a scattering of glass, and she almost forgets Miranda Tate, almost rushes to him. He's lying there, his mask broken in more ways than one. He's in pain and she longs to fix him, but the time is not right.

She keeps in mind her father's vengeance, her father's plan, but it's hard when she can see the suffering in those dear, dear eyes.

Everything begins to move faster in her mind, and Bruce's pained expression barely registers. She can find no joy in this final, long-planned act of bloodshed, in the big reveal or in the look of horror stamped into his visage. As she tells the story, reveals her secrets, she locks eyes with her protector and sees that he has given up on hiding. So has she.

As Bruce kneels bleeding, she fixes her protector, as she did that day long past when he first received the mask. She sees his strength return and smiles, but she dare not be too happy. She knows this is the end. There can be no happy endings for mercenaries and villains, for people with destructive plans. She is no fool, and nor is he. To honour her father she must leave her protector, the one thing she hoped never to have to do. What he sacrificed, her father never did. What he gave to her heart, her father never could. The way her father hurt her, he never would.

But they are too far along, too deeply mired to stop, and so she says the one thing that will end it, that will stop this before it starts. She says it because she knows it will hurt, because hurt is all she has to sever this tie and leave him. Leave him as she must. She watches a single tear glisten as it falls from his dear, dear eyes, and hopes he knows that the words hide what she really feels, what they swore to not, but what she has, since that day that they kissed, since his crime of loving her began, and since she realised she'd committed it too:

'_We can only ever be friends, my dear. Only friends now.'_

'Goodbye, my friend.'

**AN:**

**I hope you liked! :D Please review! I'm such a review sucker. Love, love, love…**


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